The Passing of the Spare Chamber

WE have no spare chamber. I have been troubled about it for a long while. Yesterday it occurred to me that the Browns have no spare chamber, either, nor the Robinsons, nor the Stuyvesants, and I am more troubled than ever.

The decadence of the spare chamber strikes deep. It is the concrete difference between past and present. The spare chamber meant a room in the house set apart from common life, dedicated to the higher nature. The family might have only three chambers: one of these was sacred. The feather bed rose plump and impregnable in its recesses. The green paper shades shut out all but a chink of light, the caneseat chairs stood stiff against the wall, and clean straw rustled under the taut “ store carpet.” The stimulus to the imagination alone was worth three times the amount of cubic space the spare chamber occupied. You tiptoed in. Mother’s best bonnet lay on the middle of the bed. Sometimes a huge loaf of fruit cake sat elegantly in one of the chairs.

There was always something reserved in the days of the spare chamber, — fruit cake and bonnets. People had best clothes. They wore them on spare days. Sunday was a spare day. You knew that it was Sunday. Grandfather shaved. (When grandfathers shave every day, what is left for the seventh ?) There was a hush about the house. As the day wore on, it deepened ; the whole farm lay under its warm, sleepy spell, — all but the irrepressible hen. The cheerful cackle lingers still, the most irreverent thing in memory. She worked seven days in the week, and talked about it. The very silence waited to hear and condemn. Amid trolley cars, and bicycle bells, and children playing, and the Salvation Army drum, the cackle dies away into a harmless whisper.

There was spare time then. People made visits,— not anxious, crowded, hurried calls, but good old-fashioned visits. The carryall was washed and oiled. Old Flora was carefully combed and brushed by grandfather, and then grandfather was brushed and combed by grandmother. Aunt Clara packed the luncheon in a big basket. There was always a spare cricket to fit in front for small folks, with a good view of Flora’s haunches going uphill, and a wide sweep of country going down. The journey was leisurely, but full of wild excitements. There were the dangerous railroad crossings, where grandfather always got out, rods ahead, and walked cautiously across, looking two ways at once. The rest of us rode boldly over, with a fine feeling of risk. Grandfather used to crack the whip in defiance of danger. There were the covered bridges, too. Old Flora’s hoofs echoed in them and repeated the trampling of armies. The loose boards rattling underneath held the child on the cricket breathless. Times have changed. Now we speed swiftly over gaudy open bridges, and the legend “No faster than a walk ” looks grimly down from either end.

We had a spare chamber at first. When the baby came, we turned it into a nursery. We cleared out a store-room for the nurse, and used the little backroom for a drying-room. Grandmother, when her first baby came, took it into her own bed. When another baby came to crowd it out, there was the trundlebed that stood under the big bed all day, and rolled out at night with a sleepy rumble. And when more babies still came to crowd the trundle-bed, the first baby, a big boy, six years old now, had a bed made for him at the head of the back stairs, or up garret, under the sloping eaves. The rain lulled him to sleep, and the snow drifted in sometimes. In the spare chamber the big bed loomed untouched. It hovered in his dreams, a presence not to be put by. The snow, the rain, the stars, and the spare chamber made a poet of him. We have no poets now.